[lucb1e]

I know France, Belgium, and the USA have no proper driver's education and that Germany and the Netherlands do (other countries I would have to look up). In Belgium, people learn from their parents and then take the exam and therefore keep repeating most of their parents' mistakes plus their own. Everyone in Germany and the Netherlands that I've talked to agrees that Belgians are terrible drivers, and France has a similar system and seem to be just as bad (though with fewer data points because they're further away).

From your link: Belgium=7.3, France=5.8, USA=7.3 versus Germany=4.2, Netherlands=4.7. I don't know what the P-value on that is (I never thought of looking at this until you mentioned it) but so far it looks like the data matches intuition.

Of course, there's a lot more factors, like that in the USA and Germany have towns much further apart than the Netherlands (I've said before that in NL you're never more than a few minutes away from being at least in hearing distance of the nearest human). This makes public transport much worse and those who don't like driving may be obliged to, but also the infrastructure costs more when there are fewer inhabitants per km² to make use of each road which should make the infrastructure worse. Indeed, driving from NL into Germany during rain, the highways instantly and universally turn from nearly dry (due to permeable concrete) to lots of spatting and aquaplaning risk.

I'm also not sure fatalities is the only thing we should be looking at. NL is higher than Germany but if you have more city traffic than highway traffic, you probably hit more bicycles and pedestrians despite better infrastructure.

Nevertheless, interesting statistic.

[mrkstu]

Not sure why you would say the US doesn't have proper drivers education. I took a mandatory semester class in high school (in the 80s) with a proper curriculum, a driving simulator, a dedicated paved training area, cars with instructor brake pedals, and lots of scary movies on how we could kill ourselves and others with bad driving...

[lucb1e]

From what I read in this thread and on reddit, in the USA (somewhat state-dependent) you can drive with almost no experience in a vehicle that has zero safety standards (some states only check up on emissions, others don't even check that, or so people on reddit said).